Delphi NAV300 Review

The Delphi Nav300 is a full-featured portable GPS unit that does everything from directing you to the store to playing MP3s.

Summary

The Delphi Nav300 is a full-featured portable GPS unit that does everything from directing you to the store to playing MP3s. It’s small enough to be unobtrusive in the car, and does a great job of getting you to your pre-defined destination, as well as finding locations for you such as banks and restaurants. Unfortunately, it’s abysmally slow, difficult to use and the screen is too small to use your fingers to punch in addresses.

Features and Design

The Delphi Nav300 is a GPS unit that not only provides GPS functionality, but also doubles as an MP3 player, media player, gaming unit, calculator, and personal massager. Okay, that last bit was a joke, but it really does have all those extra features. Let’s take a look at them.

Turn-by-turn directions

Like any GPS unit, the Nav300 provides turn-by-turn directions to get you to your destination. Once you are on course, it’ll warn you ahead of time that a turn is coming up, as well as alert you when you have arrived at your destination.

The Nav300 provides turn-by-turn directions, and can switch from 2D to 3D mode.

 

Bluetooth and Voice Commands

You can connect your Bluetooth phone to the Nav300 for hands-free calling. The built-in microphone also lets you set voice commands for favorite destinations, allowing you to begin navigation without touching a single button.

Points of Interest

The Nav300 comes pre-loaded with a database of points of interest, including restaurants, banks, stores and more. You can just tell it to find the nearest Bank of America, for example, and it will guide you to it.

Media, games and more

The Nav 300 has the capacity to play MP3 files, movies, pictures, and includes a card-matching game as well as a calculator.

In addition to navigation, you can also play music, movies, watch pictures, and more.

 

Traffic ready

The Nav300 is capable of adding real-time traffic information via a $200 USD add-on that includes an extra antenna and data uploaded via SD card.

Extras

Sadly, the extra features are largely worthless. You can play MP3s, watch videos, and have pictures displayed, but we didn’t enjoy these features at all. Listening to music on it is like listening to the radio on your alarm clock, and the screen is way too small to enjoy movies or music. The calculator may come in handy we suppose, but the card-matching game is simply lame. 

Conclusion

We’re willing to cut the Nav300 a bit of slack due to its low price of just $399 USD, but it’s still a flawed product. It’s very ponderous and slow, and due to this you would not be able to quickly dial in an address while driving. You would have to either pull over and do it, or go through the motions before driving, which can take several minutes. We were also annoyed that this GPS could never figure out which state it was in, and that there’s no place to keep the stylus when not in use. In the end, if you have the patience and are looking for an affordable GPS unit, the Nav300 might be worth a look, albeit a quick glance.

Pros:

• Accurate navigation
• Lots of features
• Can find points of interest

Cons:

• Slow
• Extra features are useless
• Screen is too small
• Orphaned stylus

Use and Testing

We used the Nav300 over the course of about six weeks, and though it was always able to point us to our destination, we ultimately came away frustrated. Let’s start at the beginning.

We plugged the Nav300 into our car’s cigarette lighter and turned it on. The bootup process for the device is agonizingly slow, taking up to one minute before you can actually do anything. And even then, you have to press OK on a disclaimer screen every time you turn it on that says using a GPS while driving is dangerous (anyone else see the irony here?).

Once we had learned the dangers of GPSing, we came to the main menu, which has eight buttons including Navigation, Music, Movies, etc. We chose Navigation, and were presented with four options: New destination, My destinations, Take me home, and Voice command.

The main navigation screen is sparse but useful.

We chose New destination, but when we went to type in an address the Nav300 thought we were in Oregon even though we were in Texas. We aren’t really sure why a GPS unit wouldn’t know what state it was in, but regardless we had to change the state to TX. The only possible reason we can think of is DT is based in Oregon, and it was configured in Oregon first, then mailed to Texas and maybe for some reason the Nav300 never recovered. Throughout testing we had to always tell the GPS what state we were in before looking up an address, which is silly. One might say it was set up to default to Oregon, which is what we thought too, but we could not locate this setting anywhere, even after reading the manual. We also set our Texas-based address to “home” on the unit, but it still defaulted to Oregon.

 

For some reason, the Nav300 always thought we resided in Oregon, even though we’re in Texas.

 

Once we were able to actually input our address, we ran into another small problem. The buttons are a bit too small to punch with your fingers, but Delphi provides a stylus which is almost required, in our opinion. The only problem is there’s nowhere to stash the stylus when you are not using it. One would think there’d be a hole in the side of the device, similar to a Palm Pilot that you can slide the stylus into, but that is not the case. We ended up keeping the stylus in a cup holder in our car, which is not ideal.

Once we had typed in an address, the Nav300 locked on to it just fine, but once it has the address you still have to press “Start Navigation,” and that process, whereby the Nav300 calculates and propagates the map is ponderous, and takes about 30 seconds or so.

So after about five minutes of plucking the keyboard, we were finally ready to have the Nav300 navigate for us, and it does a superb job once it’s up and running. It dishes out voice commands exactly as you would expect, such as “turn right in .1 miles onto such and such road,” and works very well. It also shows you landmarks on your route, such as restaurants and businesses. We also liked the fact that you can change the view from 2D to 3D, and even switch into night mode with increased contrast for nighttime viewing.

Several times we ignored the Nav300 and chose our own route, and it was able to adapt just fine and re-calculate the route perfectly – which is great.

Once we got past all the hurdles of punching in our state, then our location, it was a very competent device for basic navigation. We also liked the POI mode (points of interest) as it directed us to our nearest bank when we needed to find an ATM machine. Unfortunately, one time we tried to find a Quiznos, and looked up “sandwiches,” but it was only able to find Subway.

We did like the ability to assign our home address to a voice command, and just yell “home” and have it automatically begin navigating. This is a nice feature indeed.